Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Daisy, the Absolute, and the Emperor [SPOILERS]

Isn't "Down by the River" is just the City of Baldur's Gate itself, as it lies down stream of the River of Chiontar?

Considering the song's sexual nature, that would be very odd.

Ah I see. It does feels sexual.

I read it.... still kinda fits Guardian too, though. As I think, narratively both Daisy and Guardian serve the same purpose, to lure you using the Tadpole power and eventually turn you into mind flayer.

I wouldn’t say they both serve the same purpose. Guardian barely mentions the tadpoles in comparison, there’s no negative consequences, and it’s much less directly tempting. Daisy was mysterious, manipulative, and had an otherworldly feeling of both dread and hope about her whereas the guardian is just whiny and sits in your ear begging you not to do any little thing they disagree with. Also with the song between the lyrics about fusing together, the weird distorted sounding words in the middle, and the last line about just leaving you dreaming by the river it’s clear none of that would relate to the guardian.

I think we largely agree but I liked that Daisy was over the top evil - for many of the same reasons I like Mizora. Mizora is impossibly evil and it's a bad idea to agree with any of her plans but turning down Mizora's offers, ruining her plans for Wyll felt good. Everytime I said no to her it felt like a victory. It would have been so much easier to accept Mizora's offer to protect Wyll's dad . . .

Likewise it would have been so much easier to just *authority* my way through the goblin camp but I felt good about relying on Tav's talents. Daisy brought a tension to the decisions that Tav had to make and everytime I avoided *authority* I felt good about it. And the game rewarded me for it -- Nere was not able to make me his puppet . . .

Slightly off-topic but I am a little curious to know how much Mizora’s character changed with the Wyl rewrite. I was actually looking forward to that storyline to learn more about their relationship which seemed quite a bit different to what it is now.
I was expecting a lot of the tadpole storyline to be trying to discern which option would be the lesser of two evils with everyone’s personal storyline mirroring that to some degree, with your level of intimacy with your companions playing in to how much they would trust you or even be betrayed by you. That’s where my mind was going with Daisy but nothing like that with the Guardian.

I'm on the fence about it. The game itself doesn't do a good job supporting that kind of explicit evil, just look how it handles the consequences of assaulting the grove. If I could trust that leaning into Daisy's advice wouldn't be a massive content off button I'd probably be more comfortable with something a lot closer to how Daisy was, but I still think they needed to be adjusted in one way or another. The sexual tension alone just hits you with no build up. To the end of being a Dream Person that could easily work for Tav if we could actually inhabit their mind because dreams really do work that way, but it doesn't fit the best as part of a videogame where we are clearly consciously making choices.

I agree with this analysis. There is a lot of things about the Emperor that does not make sense, and I found myself annoyed how his story was forced on me.

A source at Larian has informed me, without explicitly confirming the following points, if you understand:

The Emperor was a very late addition.
The Emperor came about because people were not engaging with the tadpoles.
And there was a significant amount of content cut (without confirming either way if it was the upper city.)

That the Emperor is a late addition was obvious from the artbook.
That Larian changed the main story this late just because they wanted to push their tadpole powerup system no one uses shows that they are hacks.

I disagree that it shoes they're hacks or anything like that. I think that the tadpole system as it exists in current release is worse than what we had in EA, but they changed Daisy for the reason you make any change to a creative work; she was an element that was not having the effect they wanted her to have, she was a failure that had to be changed for the outcome they wanted. Maybe that outcome was a bad move to begin with, but that's different from being a hack. That's just making a poor decision.

And yet their new system failed completely as it not only makes for a worse story, reduces the quality of writing as the VA in the game still references the old situation of using tadpoles being bad and you losing something, it also does not achieve their goal as people still don't interact with tadpoles except in special evil runs or after being spoilered that despite all logic and dialogues in the game tadpoles are pure powerups with no downside, same as before.

A complete failure and not the only one. In general everything Larian did from the mid of EA onward, Shadowheart and Wyll changes, Halsin, the Tadpole power system, Emperor, ... made the game worse.

I'm not saying that the outcome is good (though I do prefer the Emperor to Daisy overall) just that I think Larian's choice here is an entirely reasonable and justifiable one. I think that being a hack implies a sort of creative insincerity, or a lack of effort, and whatever else I would say about this game, a lack of effort is not one of its faults. They had a vision for this game, a vision that clearly was constantly in flux and did not really get a direction until too late. But I can't be convinced that the people involved all put in the work to make this game happen.

Funnily enough, speaking just for myself, with the exception of some things like Shadowheart (I didn't play much EA until after that change so I don't know what she was really like before) the stuff they changed for release was also stuff I personally felt ught to have changed. I thought that Wyll's story pacing was off, that Daisy wasn't working for what they seemed to want her to be, etc. So Larian seemed to pick up on the fact those things were flawed, they just had wildly different ideas on what qualified as fixes.

A vision that is in constant flux is not a vision.

Not to be “that guy” but the emperor is easily one of the weakest, most shoe horned parts of this game. If anything is low effort it’s him

See the "Orpheus turns into a mind flayer without tadpole". They written themselves into a corner and just hand wave it.

That is low effort.

I've gone on record saying that I find the emperor far more interesting to interact with than I ever did Daisy. I've said that if they had kept the previous approach to tadpole progression and consequences but just had emperor instead of daisy, then that would have been the best outcome, so that's just a place where we flatly disagree. As for Orpheus, I agree they wrote themselves into a corner but that doesn't mean they didn't put effort into the game, it just means they planned poorly and made bad decisions. Clearly the end of this game's development was a mess, and I'm sure you've experienced how much effort it takes to manage a mess. Am I saying any of this is at all good? Definitely not, the outcome is painfully lackluster. I'm just saying all of this because I don't think not putting in enough effort is the root cause of any of these problems. If any singular aspect of the game didn't have effort behind it, it's because that effort was put towards putting out a fire that probably could have been avoided.

However the point about a vision in cosntant flux not being a vision is very true, I'll concede that point entirely. Larian's problem really seem to be that they lack people who will say "no, iteration needs to stop, we have to nail things down now." That and they seem very married to the value of spectacle and "awesomeness" first and foremost. That's something I've believed since the beginning.

When the writing goes from relatively tight and believable to nonsensical there is no other explanation than low effort on writing. Not saying the writers are fantastic but the presence of some good writing means they are capable of making good stories and the decline means somewhere along the line they picked the easy route of changing the writing to get the game out without adequately thinking about the consequences or plot problems

Where you and I differ is that I don't really think that the writing starts from a good place. I think that from the start of the game the foundations set by the writing were bad, and that the ultimate outcome we got was pretty much inevitable based on that. If the writing seemed good initially, then it's just because it's still starting small, planting the inocuous seeds that will grow into what problems we see down the line.

And even if what you were saying is the case, I am very hesitant to put a poor game down to lack of effort by the creators. From everything I've read and watched and learned about game development, it's a difficult, complicated job there comes a point where sometimes sacrifices in quality HAVE to be made in order to actually get the game to ship. I clearly am not inclined to give Larian a lot of grace on this game, but unless I hear it from someone on the team, I won't believe that the poor writing is a result of "taking the easy route." That makes it sound like at some point they decided to just stop putting in effort when what I expect happened is that soemwhere along the line, poor planning meant that they had no other choice but to let things fall to the wayside because that was the only way to actually finish the game, not because they just didn't want to put the work into it.

This is basically what I was told about the cut content. When it came time to lock in assets and etc, there was still a lot of new things being added (or planning to be added.)